Tanaz Eshaghian was born on September 8, 1974 in Iran and is an Iranian-American documentary filmmaker.
Tanaz Eshaghian left Iran with her mother at the age of six. She grew up in New York City, went to Trinity School and graduated from Brown University in 1996 with a BA in Semiotics.
Her first film “I Call Myself Persian,” completed in 2002, told the story of how Iranians living in the U.S. were affected by prejudice and xenophobia after the September 11 attacks. In Love Iranian-American Style, completed in 2006, she filmed her traditional Iranian family, both in New York and Los Angeles, California documenting their obsession with marrying her off and her own cultural ambivalence.
For her début feature-length film Be Like Others, a provocative look at men in Iran choosing to undergo sex change surgery, she returned to Iran for the first time in twenty-five years. Be Like Others, a BBC 2, France 5, ITVS production, premiered at the 2008 Sundance film festival and went on to win the Teddy special jury prize at the Berlin Film Festival and was nominated for and Emmy award. In 2011, she completed “Love Crimes of Kabul” a documentary film inside a women’s prison in Kabul Afghanistan focusing on “moral crimes” for HBO.
Her films have also screened at the Museum of Modern Art and in the Walter Reade cinema at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City.
She currently resides in New York City.
